Thursday, January 27, 2011

Daring Bakers-Biscuit Joconde Imprime/Entremet-Challenge #1

The January 2011 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Astheroshe of the blog accro. She chose to challenge everyone to make a Biscuit Joconde Imprime to wrap around an Entremets dessert.

As mentioned in a prior post, I became a member of the Daring Kitchen and joined both the Daring Bakers and the Daring Cooks groups. This was my first official challenge as a member of the Daring Bakers. I was exciting about the challenge and immediately thought of caramel and chocolate, caramel being one of my favorite things.

I must say the finished product was not exactly what I had in mind. I still ended up impressing my group of friends, The Steves. The Steves (there are two of us named Steve, so everyone has a Steve name, I'm *Runner Steve and there is a Hostess Steve, Queen Steve, Hey Steve, and so on) are the group of friends I and my partner hang out with almost every Friday night. A few weeks ago, I let them know I would bring dessert for the night.

At first, I thought the dessert would take about 4 to 5 hours to prepare, that was including time for it to set up in the fridge. Actually it took me almost 8 hours in total to get through everything. The biscuit Joconde Imprime being the biggest challenge. My sponge cake ended up being undercooked in the middle but overbaked around the edges. Thankfully I had enough to line my springform pan. Honestly, I'm happy I learned the technique for this, but do not think I will be trying again it anytime soon.

However, I did enjoy learning how to make the Praline Feuillete and the Praline powder and butter (see the previous post), the caramel mouuse. Both of these were the favorite parts of all of the Steves. I definitely will be adding both of these to my collection of recipes and will be making them again, especially the caramel mousse. I've made homemade caramel many many times.

Anyways, below is a few pictures of the final project. The base was a Praline Feuillete (using rice krispies), then a chocolate mousse, ganache, salted caramel with toasted almonds, caramel mousse, and finally caramel sauce and toasted almonds on top.